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Martyrdom, Suicide, and the Islamic Law of War: a Short Legal History

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Martyrdom, Suicide, and the Islamic Law of War: a Short Legal History \\server05\productn\F\FIN\27-1\FIN102.txt unknown Seq: 1 31-DEC-03 14:19 MARTYRDOM, SUICIDE, AND THE ISLAMIC LAW OF WAR: A SHORT LEGAL HISTORY Bernard K. Freamon* INTRODUCTION Religion is the mother of war. Conflicts involving religion are among the most intractable of human disputes. Yet, until recently, wars motivated or influenced by religious ideologies have been confined to small well-defined theaters. Europe’s Thirty Years War, which ended in 1648, appears to be the only exception in the modern history of warfare.1 Indeed, in the last three millennia the world has seen much war but it has not seen a full-scale religious war of global proportions since the end of the Crusades. There is reason to believe that this state of affairs is about to change. The horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as well as the Western military incursion in Afghanistan, the invasion and conquest of Iraq, and continuing Islamist guerilla attacks and terrorist violence against military and civilian targets in a variety of countries with signifi- cant Muslim populations makes one wonder whether the West2 * Professor of Law and Director, Program for the Study of Law in the Middle East, Seton Hall Law School. Professor Freamon is a Doctor in the Science of Law (JSD) candidate at Columbia Law School. Research support provided by the Seton Hall Law School Faculty Development Fund is gratefully acknowledged. Special gratitude is owed to George P. Fletcher for his vision in suggesting the pursuit of this topic and for his insightful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to Joseph Raz for his probing ques- tions and comments in the formative stages of this project. Thanks also to William E. Nelson and members of the Legal History Colloquium at New York University School of Law and to the Faculty Development Seminar at Washington and Lee School of Law for their thoughtful oral and written comments on later drafts. Thanks to the Society for Law and Ideas at Columbia Law School for providing a forum for exploration of some of these ideas. Thanks also to Rainer Brunner, George Conk, Robert A. Diab, Louise Halper, Etan Kohlberg, D. Michael Risinger, Calvin Sharpe, Daniel Solove, Charles Sul- livan, and Joyce Zonana for helpful suggestions; to Abed Awad, Esq. for his research suggestions and encouragement; to Sonia Wentzel, Esq. for her translation of portions of Christoph Reuter’s MEIN LEBEN IST EINE WAFFE; and to my research assistants: Ferris Nesheiwat, Christopher Barr, Basem Ramadan, Abdelmageid Abdelhadi, Elizabeth Trottier, and Naazneen Khan for their excellent research. Special thanks to Abed Younis for his translations of the Sunni and Shi’a fiqh texts and encouragement, and to the editors and staff of the Fordham International Law Journal. All errors are mine. 1. I am indebted to William E. Nelson for this observation. 2. The terms “West” and “Western” are intended to describe those governments 299 \\server05\productn\F\FIN\27-1\FIN102.txt unknown Seq: 2 31-DEC-03 14:19 300 FORDHAM INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 27:299 may indeed be plunging into a protracted religious war with the Islamic world.3 Whether or not this is true, it is clear that militant Islam presents profound and difficult challenges for Western political and legal systems. Concomitantly, the Islamic world confronts its own significant challenges from both within and without. Muslims seem to be in great turmoil and despair, deeply troub- led by the perceived marginalization and demonization of Is- lamic ideas and norms in Western discourse and by the Arab world’s glaring failure to achieve significant progress in scien- tific, technological, and political realms.4 There is also deep, widespread anger among Muslims over the subordination, hu- miliation, and physical subjugation of certain Muslim communi- ties, especially the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza, known today as the Occupied Territories.5 Classical Islamic juridical-religious doctrine dictates that when non-Muslim adversaries seriously threaten Islam or Muslim communities — because of their Islamic identity — Muslims are entitled to go to war to defend their religion, the community, and the Dar al-Islam.6 This kind of war, arguably the only kind of and communities that trace the origins of their jurisprudential, political, philosophical, and sociological systems of thought back to the events that we now describe as the European “Enlightenment.” See, e.g., Crane Brinton, Enlightenment, in THE ENCYCLOPE- DIA OF PHILOSOPHY 519-35 (Paul Edwards ed., Macmillan Publishing Co. 1972) (1967)(describing the “Enlightenment” as a “broad designation for a historical period, roughly the eighteenth century” that involved the popularization in Europe of social contract theory, “natural rights,” and the prestige of natural science, and an emphasis on reason, conceptions of the public good, and progress). 3. See, e.g., Michael Scott Doran, Somebody Else’s Civil War, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Jan.- Feb. 2002, at 22 (suggesting that the war between the United States and Al Qaeda is actually between the salafiyya [Muslims seeking a return to the original Islamic practice] and U.S.-supported secularists, and that the United States may be drawn into that war with potentially disastrous consequences); see also SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER 209-18, 312-18 (1996) (sug- gesting possibility of a global war between the West and the Islamic world). 4. See, e.g., U.N. DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME, ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT: CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS, U.N Sales No. E.02.III.B.9 (2002). This sociological study, employing several leading Arab social scientists, concludes that the Arab world greatly lags behind all others in three critical areas: political freedom, access to knowledge, and advancement of the status of women. See also Special Report: Arab Development: Self-doomed to Failure, THE ECONOMIST, July 4, 2002, at 24. 5. See, e.g., Don Oldenburg, For Palestinians Here, the Ring of Fear; Anxiety Mounts as Calls Home Go Unanswered, WASH. POST, Apr. 25, 2002, at C1. 6. Literally, “the abode of Islam” or “the abode of peace.” Classical Muslim jurists divided the world into two parts: “the abode of Islam” [Dar al-Islam] and “the abode of war” [Dar al-Harb]. See MAJID KHADDURI, WAR AND PEACE IN THE LAW OF ISLAM 52 \\server05\productn\F\FIN\27-1\FIN102.txt unknown Seq: 3 31-DEC-03 14:19 2003] MARTYRDOM, SUICIDE, AND ISLAMIC LAW 301 war permitted by Islamic law,7 is described in the classical sources as an important variety of the religious obligation of ji- had.8 The Prophet Muhammad taught that there are two kinds of jihad. The “greater jihad” [jihad al akbar] involves the individ- ual’s constant and eternal struggle with the evil and immoral as- pects of the self. This was said by the Prophet to be much more important than the “lesser jihad” [jihad al asgar] which includes, inter alia, the military struggle by Muslims collectively seeking to defend the religion or the community. It is the notion of the “greater jihad,” with its emphasis on justice, rectitude, fidelity, integrity, and truth that gives the concept of jihad its profound meaning in Islamic theology and law. This attitude pervades the entire theory of Islamic law toward all lesser jihadist behavior, including the military jihad, and the level of intention and pur- pose required of the believer in discharging his or her jihad obli- gations. (1955); ERWIN I.J. ROSENTHAL, POLITICAL THOUGHT IN MEDIEVAL ISLAM: AN INTRODUC- TORY OUTLINE 24 (Cambridge University Press 1962) (1958); A. Abel, Dar al Islam, 2 ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF ISLAM 127 (B. Lewis et al. eds., 1965). [hereinafter in EI2]. In the classical view, the term Dar al-Islam describes those places in the world where the Shari‘ah, the corpus of Islamic law, prevails and is enforced. Every other place in the world, except those places where a peace treaty with the Muslims is in place, is part of the Dar al-Harb. This partition flowed from a pan-Islamic vision, developed during the formative period in Islamic history, that all of the world eventually would be brought under Islamic sovereignty. The vision contemplated a non-Muslim world that was pre- sumed to be hostile to Islam. The tremendous increase in the number of Muslims now living in relative peace and prosperity in pluralist and tolerant secular societies in the West and in the Far East throws the utility of the classical Islamic view of the world into some doubt. 7. See KHADDURI, supra note 6, at 62; see also E. Tyan, Djihad, in EI2, supra note 6, at R 538. 8. The concept of jihad [literally “struggle,” “striving,” or “exertion in pursuit of a goal”] has a much more profound meaning in Islamic terms than in the reductionist sense — connoting religious war or “holy war” — current in the West. Nonetheless, the term has long been used, in scholarly discourse and in everyday parlance, both in the Islamic world and in the West, as a fairly apt description of efforts by Muslims to use military methods, including war and violence, to advance or defend their religious val- ues, goals, and objectives. When the word jihad is used in this narrower sense, it is more accurate to refer to it as a “military jihad.” See, e.g. Colin Nickerson, Not Easy to Define “Jihad”, MILWAUKEE J. SENTINEL, Oct. 1, 2001, available at www.jsonline.com/news/edito- rials/oct01/nickerson14101301.asp; JACOB NEUSNER & TAMARA SONN, COMPARING RELI- GIONS THROUGH LAW 206-13 (1999) (noting the distinction between “military jihad” and “jihad”). For a comprehensive look at the meanings and distortions of jihad, see HIKMI M.
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